A Different Take on Great Ape Personhood

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A Different Take on Great Ape Personhood

It's an uncomfortable sight, experienced by most anyone who's ever been to a big-city zoo: chimpanzees or gorillas behind a window, captive in a patch of semi-artificial forest where their every gesture is cheered by a hooting crowd.

Never mind that the animals are well-treated and, by their presence, teach humans to care about their precarious survival in an ever-shrinking wild. There's just something so human about them. It's an unscientific but compelling sentiment, tied up in their interactions, their physiques, and most of all the way they look back at us.

Separated from Homo sapiens by an evolutionary eyeblink of eight million years or less, great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos — often seem a bit too much like us for our comfort. One wonders exactly what — or who — one is looking at. Are they aware of their circumstances? Are they any happier than you would be as captive entertainment? And though they're obviously not human, are they people?

This question has guided much of my primate research coverage in the last year, culminating in two recent articles on chimpanzee personhood and research ethics. When I started, I felt that the great apes ought to be considered people. Now I wonder if the question itself, as it's usually framed, is misleading.

"That closeness, the biological and behavioral continuity, makes it a lot easier to look into the eyes of a chimp and see a reflection of yourself," said Jared Taglialatela, a Clayton State University primatologist who studies chimpanzee communication. "But in the same way, humans should take a look around and say, we're not so different than all the other animals out there."

To Taglialatela, chimpanzee "personhood" is a judgment that falls on a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics — a spectrum of subtle gradations, one that doesn't place humans above and outside the animal kingdom, but within it. Calling great apes "people" is arbitrary and, in any case, not a black-and-white judgment.

That's quite a different approach than mine had been. Personhood struck me as black-and-white: one decided on measurements that defined the condition, and great apes either qualified or didn't. In many ways, they satisfied my criteria. To varying degrees they feel joy and grief, are capable of empathy, think abstractly and can learn basic language. There are biological similarities as well, with the latest addition to the literature published Thursday in Current Biology: chimpanzees use the same part of their brains to recognize faces as humans do. That similarity hasn't been found in any other creature.

These characteristics are, of course, expressed more coarsely in great apes than human societies — or so we like to think, given the many ways in which humans often fail to act like people. And adult sophistication is not demanded of infants or the mentally disabled, who we still consider people.

Such arguments were made last year by advocates for Hiasl, an orphaned chimpanzee, for whom activists demanded from Austria's highest court the legal protections afforded by human rights law. They lost, but were more successful in Spain, where in July the parliament passed a resolution granting human rights to great apes.

But for Tagliatela and Pascal Gagneux — a University of California, SanDiego primate geneticist who advocates more-humane chimpanzee research — granting human rights reveals the paradoxes inherent to a binary version of personhood. They can't be treated like mice or dogs, but however person-like they may appear, they can't be held accountable as people.

"Would you punish chimps that commit infanticide or eat humans or castrate their neighbors?" asked Gagneux. "A chimpanzee can be sick, and the others will check on them, but they don't care to the extent that they go find some food and bring it to a sick animal. Why not?They are a different species. They are not us."

He described watching chimpanzees in the wild torture a forest antelope for fun, nearly killing it before — in a breach of research etiquette — he intervened. "That was a total ethical misstep. I'd just had enough. These chimpanzees didn't even eat it. It was clear from the get-go: this was going to be a sentient, living toy," he said.

Gagneux does, however, want to grant research chimpanzees the protections afforded human subjects incapable of giving informed consent to participation in a study. Like Taglialatela, he sees personhood debates as masking the spectrum of sentience — and toTaglialatela, this tendency is part of a mistaken view of humanity as existing separately from nature.

"We've spent a lot of modern history building up walls that place us outside the natural world, and what we should do is see ourselves smack-dab in the middle of it," he said. "In some ways, chimpanzees give us this gateway. And when you actually develop a relationship with chimpanzees, you see so much humanity reflected in their behavior, that it crosses you into their realm."

Humans become just another species — and one tasked, by our own capacity for action and reflection, with responsibilities towards our animal kin. "Once we put ourselves in nature, we see that habitat destruction and population decline isn't just happening in the Ivory Coast, but in our backyards," said Taglialatela.

He said that zoo-bound primates are essential for winning the sympathies of a public who would otherwise ignore their looming demise. And for Gagneux, captive animals are — well — themselves.

"Researchers who know chimpanzees from the field can't help but feel when they see a chimp in a cage that it's lost its dignity. There's a profound dignity they have in the field," he said. "People see them as animals, scary and brutish. But if you've walked past them, taken a nap next to a big alpha male, fallen asleep with them — you know they're not brutes."